Can Your Relationship Survive A Baby?

At a backyard barbeque a month before I delivered my twin boys, the dads tossed around a Frisbee while the moms sat around a table predicting that my marriage was about to implode. "You guys will fight over the stupidest stuff," one woman insisted. "You just wait!" I wasn't buying it. After all, my husband, Paul, rubbed my swollen feet every night during my third trimester. He told me I "glowed," and he folded the laundry. In three years of marriage, we'd never had a noteworthy argument.

Now? Two years into parenthood, we've had nearly enough fights to earn us our own reality TV show. Our sarcasm and scorekeeping ("I just watched the boys for two hours!" "What do you want — a medal? I had them for two hours and 20 minutes yesterday!") have subsided since the first year. But just this morning we had a blowup — over the "amazingly ineffective" way I clean the boys' bibs and the fact (yes, it's a fact) that Paul can't monitor an omelet while slicing a banana. Boy, was I naïve — just like most parents-to-be.

"Our culture has way too much mythology about new parenthood — that it's all wonderful," says Tina Tessina, Ph.D., LMFT, author of 2008's Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting About the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Marriage. "When you see what the whole deal is actually like, it's a big shock. Parents get irritated and exhausted and start blaming each other."